Workshop on Norbert Elias

Professor Emeritus Stephen Mennell

UCD Humanities Institute of

Ireland

Norbert Elias, 18971990

Two peculiarities of his reputation:

Recognition came right at the end of his life so
hes in a sense a more recent figure than his
dates imply
Though he called himself a sociologist, his work is
much wider than conventional sociology today,
and he often seems to attract more interest from
scholars outside his own discipline
His life-story is relevant to understanding these
peculiarities, and his work in general
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Who was Norbert Elias?

Who was Norbert Elias?

Who was Norbert Elias?

Born 1897 in Breslau, which was then in German

Silesia, now the Polish city of Wrocaw
Jewish, but very German family
Anti-Semitism? he denied experiencing it much,
but probably formative experience
First World War
University of Breslau philosophy and medicine
The row with Richard Hnigswald certainly
formative rejection of Kantian a priori led to
rejection of philosophy per se postphilosophical sociology chains of generations
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Who was Norbert Elias?

Great German inflation 1922

Freikorps street fighting, instability of Weimar
Republic
In meantime, Elias went to Heidelberg as a
sociologist, not philosopher
Alfred Weber, Karl Mannheim
Frankfurt and the Frankfurt School
Hitler, 1933: Elias witnessed violent takeover of
city and university
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Who was Norbert Elias?

Exile in Paris, then London poverty

All this throws a different light on his theory of
civilising processes
ber den Prozess der Zivilisation written in
London, published in Basle in 1939, but not
published in English (The Civilizing Process) until
197882
Really sense of civilisation as a thin and fragile
veneer
His mother died in Auschwitz
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Who was Norbert Elias?

LSE, internment etc.

Precarious living as extra-mural lecturer
Group Analysis important school of
psychotherapy
Finally, at age of 57, obtained job in minor British
university, Leicester, in 1954

Who was Norbert Elias?

Leicester years: development of theory of

knowledge and the sciences (involvement and
detachment)
And pioneered the sociology of sport, with Eric
Dunning
Professor in Ghana, 196264 collection of
African art insightful writings on art too

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Who was Norbert Elias?

Fame grew after reissue of ber den Prozess der

Zivilisation and first publication of Die hfische
Gesellschaft in German, in 1969 but a decade
later in English
Then a dozen other books, and around 100
articles see Bibliography handout

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Why The Civilizing Process?

What was the fundamental sociological problem

that Elias wanted to help solve when he began
the research on manners and state formation in
Europe that led to The Civilizing Process?
How human habitus changes over many
generations in this case, a mere 500 years in
Europe. (Later he was interested in far longer
processes human development as a whole.)
The e-coli of civilising processes!

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Why The Civilizing Process?

Habitus is second nature learned social

standards of behaviour and feeling = historical
social psychology
The way in which individual members of a group
experience whatever affects their senses, the
meaning it has for them, depends on the
standard forms of dealing with, and thinking
about, these phenomena gradually evolved in
their society
He said that in connection with the growth of
knowledge, but it also applies to changing
habitus
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Why The Civilizing Process?

The idea of changing human habitus often causes

a negative reaction (especially from
anthropologists, who are still collectively
recovering from being the handmaidens of
colonialism)
Consequence has been an orthodoxy that
Wittfogel called developmental agnosticism

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Why The Civilizing Process?

But remember a remark by Kluckhohn and

Murray in 1948:
Every person is in certain respects
(a) like every other person
(b) like some other people
(c) like no other person

Every individual process of socialisation into

prevailing social standards of behaviour, feeling
and thinking is also a process of individualisation
of those social standards

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Outline of The Civilizing Process

Book originally in two volumes:

I: changes in the behaviour of the secular upper
classes in the West
II: State formation and civilisation

Each volume contains two parts, thus:

1. On the sociogenesis of the concepts of civilisation
and culture emic level
2. Civilisation as a specific transformation of human
behaviour etic level
3. Feudalisation and state formation
4. Synopsis: towards a theory of civilising processes

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Part 1: The concepts of civilisation and

culture
Civilisation is a controversial word shot
through with value-judgements.
We use it as a term of self-approbation that is,
we like to see ourselves as civilised.

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Part 1: The concepts of civilisation and

culture
What does it mean, to claim we are civilised?
polite, good-mannered, considerate to others
clean, decent, hygienic
humane, gentle, kind
restrained, even-tempered, not violent

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Part 1: The concepts of civilisation and

culture
By the nineteenth century, European people had
come to describe themselves as civilised, and to
see themselves as superior to other people
whom they described as primitive or savage or
barbaric.
They also came to think of themselves as
inherently, innately civilised.

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Part 1: The concepts of civilisation and

culture
In fact, there was nothing inherent about their
ways of behaving and feeling (and nothing
inherently superior either).
BUT some ways of behaving and feeling had
become so deeply habituated, and so taken for
granted, that they felt innate even to European
people themselves.

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Part 1: The concepts of civilisation and

culture
They became unconscious of the fact that they
had learned these ways of behaving, and that
their standards were the product of a long intergenerational learning process.

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Part 2: Manners Books

Part 2 of Eliass book deals with the way manners

had changed over the centuries, as they were
depicted in manners books from the 13th to the
19th century, in Germany, France, Italy and
England.
That also means changing feelings, emotions

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Part 2: Manners Books

These books were addressed to the upper classes

to courtiers and would-be courtiers, then later
to bourgeois groups. (Not to the hoi polloi!!)

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Part 2: Manners Books

So it comes as a shock to find what they discussed,

and obviously had to discuss:
table manners
natural functions
blowing ones nose
spitting
behaviour in the bedroom

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Part 2: Manners Books

Trajectory is:
Medieval books set out some basic rules (no
zero-points), but briefly and not change much.
From Renaissance, rules become more elaborate,
more is said.
Later, less needs to be said, and some things
cannot be said.

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Part 2: Manners Books

EXAMPLES:
Table manners
Natural functions (= defecation and urination)
Blowing ones nose
Spitting
In the Bedroom (dressing and undressing)

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Including the generally puzzling question

of nakedness

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Among the Nuer (Evans-Pritchard,

1920s)

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And in medieval Europe

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Or Botticellis Birth of Venus

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 including the puzzling question of

sexuality

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Part 2: Manners Books

More generally, why study outward bodily

propriety?
Because ALL human societies have some rules or
standards about how these biological needs are
handled.
Because all human infants are born in the same
emotional condition the lifetime point of
departure is always the same.
And, therefore, when the social standards for
dealing with these matters change over time, the
changes are easy to track
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Part 2: Manners Books

The overall trend: a sequential order of

development:
People became aware of more things being
forbidden. Caxton (late 15th century):
Thingis whilom used ben now leyd aside
Thingis sometyme alowed is now
repruid

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Part 2: Manners Books

An invisible wall of affects [emotions] growing up

between peoples bodies.
They saw that they were naked, and were
ashamed.
Advance of the threshold of shame and
embarrassment [or repugnance]

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Part 2: Manners Books

Activities moved behind the scenes of social life

and, in a sense, behind the scenes of mental life
too repressed into the unconscious.

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Part 2: Manners Books

Explaining the trend: reasons for the changes:

Not material reasons.
Not reasons of health and hygiene
Reason is not the motor of the civilising of
behaviour contra Max Weber

But significance of reasons of respect.

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Part 2: Manners Books

Only quite late in the process do standards come

to apply to everyone and in all circumstances.
It isnt a question simply of more self-control
Note that earlier societies often had areas of
extreme self-control native Americans, ascetic
monks, etc.

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Part 2: Manners Books

Standards gradually come to be

more even
more automatic
more all-embracing

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Has the civilising process gone into

reverse?
BUT, if that was the long-term trend, how can we
explain the apparent reversal in Permissive
Society?
This question has been dealt with in detail by Cas
Wouters key idea is a highly controlled
decontrolling of emotional controls

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Part 3: Fear, Danger and Violence

The civilising process, evident in the changing

contents of manners books, can also be seen in
changing social standards governing
aggressiveness, violence and cruelty
The advance of the threshold of repugnance
towards violence
Has violence changed too since the Middle Ages?
see Slide 3 from Mittelalterlicher Hausbuch

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Part 3: Fear, Danger and Violence

Is Man Aggressive? not a static question this

too changes over time according to social
circumstance
Early Middle Ages most of secular upper class
were leaders of armed bands. They had little
other social function but to fight. They loved it.
Mutilation of prisoners, rape, pillage.

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Part 3: Fear, Danger and Violence

Later, increased survival chances from selfrestraint even on the battlefield increasing
military discipline.
Public executions and torture. (See account of
public dismemberment at beginning of Michel
Foucault, Discipline and Punish.)
Pieter Spierenburg, The Spectacle of Suffering,
1984
Later still, spectatorship, mimetic pleasure.

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Part 3: Fear, Danger and Violence

Long-term incidence of violence seems generally

to be down (see slide)
Further discussion: see Mennell, The American
Civilizing Process, chapter 6

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Part 3: Fear, Danger and Violence

The link to state formation:

If, in this or that region, the power of central
authority grows, if over a larger or smaller area
people are forced to live at peace with one
another, the moulding of the affects and the
standards of the demands upon the management
of emotions are gradually changed as well.
(Elias)

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Part 3: State formation processes

What is a state?
Max Weber defined a state as:
an organisation which successfully upholds a
claim to successful rule-making over a territory,
by virtue of commanding a monopoly of the
legitimate use of violence
(Economy and Society, vol. I, p. 54)

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Part 3: State formation processes

Spiral process: pacification promotes trade,

economic growth, growth of towns, yielding
taxes, supporting more effective administration,
better armies, bigger wars, bigger pacified
territories and so on.

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Part 4: Bringing it all together

How are civilising changes in habitus linked to

state formation (and other macro processes)?
Diminishing danger (within a pacified territory)
diminishes fear, which makes possible greater
emotional detachment and greater control over
impulses
Central idea of lengthening chains of
interdependence

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Part 4: Bringing it all together

Component part-processes include

1. The social constraint towards self-constraint
(conversion of Fremdzwang into Selbstzwang)
2. Spread of the pressure for foresight
3. Diminishing contrasts, increasing varieties
4. Taming and courtisation of warriors
5. Muting of drives: psychologisation and
rationalisation
6. Shame and repugnance
7. Increasing pressure from below
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The Court Society, historical social

psychology, and the arts
Courtiers at Versailles under Louis XIV
Demanding standards of self-constraint reflected
in culture: drama of Corneille and Racine, art of
Watteau, gardens of Le Ntre
Begins from the structure of the dwelling plan
of a palais, from the Encyclopdie

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The Court Society, historical social

psychology, and the arts
See also Elias, Mozart: the Sociology of a Genius
(originally subtitled Bourgeois Artist in Court
Society)
And Bram Kempers, Painting, Power and
Patronage (London: Allen Lane, 1992)
Olle Edstrm, A Different Story: Aesthetics and
the History of Western Music (Hillsdale, NY:
Pendragon Press, 2008).

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Theoretical Objections

1. The barbarisation argument (Bauman, Modernity

and the Holocaust) see Elias, The Germans
2. The permissive society argument see Wouters,
Informalization and Sex and Manners
3. The argument from cultural relativism
4. The argument from stateless civilisations

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Knowledge and the Sciences

How is the theory of civilising processes related

to a theory of knowledge, and of sciences (in the
plural)?
Think all the way back to Eliass dispute with
Hnigswald
Need a theory of knowledge that steers between
the Scylla of philosophical absolutism and the
Charybdis of sociological relativism
Key problems:
Objectivity
The growth of knowledge
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Involvement and Detachment

Weber Wertfreiheit
Elias says objectivity not matter of heroic
individual psychology, but of the social
development of standards of emotion
management
In other words an aspect of a long-term
civilising process
InvolvementDetachment continuum

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Involvement and Detachment

One cannot say of a mans outlook in any absolute

sense that it is detached or involved (or, if one
prefers, rational or irrational, objective or
subjective). Only small babies, and among
adults perhaps only insane people, become
involved in whatever they experience with
complete abandon to their feelings here and now;
and again only insane people can remain totally
unmoved by what goes on around them.

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Involvement and Detachment

Neither psychological nor social not cause

and effect
Rather:

The way in which individual members of a group

experience whatever affects their senses, the
meaning it has for them, depends on a the
standard forms of dealing with, and thinking
about, these phenomena gradually evolved in
their society

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Involvement and Detachment

E.g. distinction between living and non-living

things
Highly reality-congruent it works consistently
but it didnt always exist

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Involvement and Detachment

Some scope for individual variations in emotional

reaction to thunder, fire, illness but in scientific
societies, the concepts that all individuals use
embody high degree of detachment lightning
tree, disease, electricity, cause, time,
organism.
Not much scope for animism but more in
society than in nature

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Fantasy and Reality

Lifetime civilising process: for children

everywhere, the distinction between fantasy and
reality is more blurred than for adults
We learn the distinction between fantasy and
reality, like other knowledge, in accordance with
the public standard reached in our society
And in scientificindustrial society, this public
standard is very clear and rigid

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Fantasy and Reality

But the magicalmythical mode of experience

does not cease to exist it endures in what
Freud called the unconscious
And it comes nearer to the surface in some areas
such as politics than in others

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Science as a Detour via Detachment

Situation of danger: Edgar Allen Poes story A

Descent into the Maelstrom
Principle of emotion management
Science involves detour via detachment
construction of a theory by the brother who
survived

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Science as a Detour via Detachment

Detour behaviour = deferred gratification

Essential element in rationality guiding of
action by means of symbolic representation of
the connection between present means and
future ends
Early examples: tool making, hunting, control of
fire

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Growth of the Sciences

Pursuit of universal laws of nature e.g.

Boyles Law apparent utter emotional
detachment

But do these eternal laws apply outside the

physical sciences? problem of physics envy
atomistic fallacy

Eliass model of models

Levels of integration Needham, Huxley,

Waddington

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Growth of the Sciences

Complexity of integration increases up the

hierarchy of the sciences:

Universal laws apply to congeries (loose

integration), reversible like Boyles Law

Chemistry structure theories (three

dimensions sugar C6H12O6, many varieties

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Growth of the Sciences

Or Crick & Watsons double helix of DNA

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Growth of the Sciences

Biology process theories in 4 dimensions

(space & time in evolution) not universal, not
reversible much higher level of integration
growth, development

By extension, society still more complex:

Needs process theories in 5 dimensions

space, time, experience (or the symbolic
dimension)

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The Social Sciences

Objects are also subjects. Difficulties:

Double distanciation but capacity for that itself
grows over time as social process
Structured processes of change yet no-one is
planning interweaving of interdependent people
From plans arising, yet unplanned
By purpose moved, yet purposeless

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